Politics & Power Quote by Leo Rosten

Conservatism gets roasted here as a kind of delayed courage: it rejects upheaval in real time, then turns yesterday's troublemakers into today's tasteful monuments. Rosten’s line works because it flips the conservative self-image of steady wisdom into a portrait of aesthetic appreciation without risk. You don’t have to face the police, the job loss, the family rupture, the smear campaign. You just have to buy the commemorative stamp.

The joke has teeth because it’s not really about ideology as a set of principles; it’s about timing and social permission. Radicals are intolerable when they threaten existing hierarchies, but become charming once their demands have been absorbed, sanitized, and renamed as “common sense.” The subtext is that tradition isn’t a neutral inheritance; it’s yesterday’s argument, settled and then misremembered as inevitability. By the time the radical is safely dead, their edges can be filed down into a narrative of national progress that flatters everyone still alive.

Rosten, a midcentury American novelist with a satirist’s ear for civic hypocrisy, is writing from a culture that loved to lionize rebels of the distant past while treating contemporary dissent as disorder: think abolitionists turned into marble saints, suffragists into quaint heroines, labor organizers into “important voices” only after the violence has been footnoted. The line isn’t a claim that all conservatives are insincere; it’s a diagnosis of a social pattern: admiration, when delayed long enough, becomes just another form of refusal.